Day One: the Anglican Cemetery on Forest Road

The weather was perfect
for taking pictures!

After weeks of research, our journey to locate and document the burial sites of those about the S.S. Florizel has finally begun. Earlier this week, Nora, our assistant manager, and I had the opportunity to go and find headstones at the Anglican Cemetery on Forest Road in St. John's. First off, I was rather surprised at how large the cemetery was! I've been to that area of town a few times for sure, but I'd never realized just how large the site itself is. We definitely had our work cut out for us.

Potential burial site of
George Long. He was buried
in an Anglican cemetery in
St. John's, and that's all
we know so far.

We started by narrowing down an area of the map based on the average time period; it's rather unlikely that someone who died in 1918 would be buried in an area full of people born in the 1940s. This helped, but it still left a large portion to be searched. We had spent probably an hour, walking up and down every single row to make sure we didn't miss anybody. My biggest fear was that if we walked past someone without noticing them, we may never find them.

That's when our luck changed for the better: some of the men who were taking care of the grounds came over to ask us about what we were doing there. Since most people coming to simply pay respects don't bring clipboards and cameras, we definitely looked out of place. After explaining the project to them, they set us up with some of their own recordings, narrowing down the possible locations to rows, which was MUCH faster than our previous method. A thousand 'thank-you's go out to them for that.

A map of roughly where the headstones we located are.

One thing I have been pondering recently is what it is that we want to call this project. It has been a major on-taking of ours and I feel it deserves a proper name, even if it's just one to use for myself. Originally, I was just calling it a grave-hunting expedition, but that was too reminiscent of Lara Croft and tomb raiding for my liking. Then I started calling it 'Tombstone Tourism', which is the idea of taking interest in cemeteries as tourist destinations, but that didn't seem to give the cemetery the respect it innately called for. If you have any ideas on what we should call it, feel free to leave a comment below! I look forward to hearing from you all!

An enlarged view of the busier section

Also, here is a list of our discoveries from day one of our adventure, with links to their Find A Grave entry:

Captain James Bartlett: LINK

Edward Berteau: LINK

William Earle: LINK

Thomas Hennebury: LINK

John Johnston: LINK

Possibly George Long (he was buried there and could not locate him, but found a 'G. Long'): LINK

William Moore: LINK

Clarence Moulton: LINK

George Moulton: LINK

Betty Munn: LINK

John Shannon Munn: LINK

Fred Snow: LINK

Joseph Stockley: LINK

Evelyn Trenchard: LINK

William Walters: LINK